SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Fewer than a sixth as many California public school teachers are getting layoff notices this year than got the pink slips last year.

Education advocates say the passage of Proposition 30 saved local schools from having to make billions of dollars of cuts to costs savings, thus saving the jobs for many teachers.

Still about 3,000 teachers were given notice this past week that they could be out of jobs, compared to 20,000 last year.

“It would have been another $6 billion in cuts for California had we not passed Prop 30,” Gray Harris with the Alameda Education Association tells KRON 4’s Dan Kerman. “Prop 30 isn’t going to fix everything but it’s going to stop it from getting worse.”

Activists say if Prop 30 had failed, there would have been more class size increases, more furlough days, and more layoffs this year.

Teachers say it’s important to be able to plan from year to year.

“Hopefully it means some stability for teachers where they’re not going to continue to be laid off and re-hired and having to be in this limbo of not knowing if they have a job, not knowing if they’re coming back to the same school, not being able to plan for their program and their students,” Harris adds. ”

In the Bay Area, 185 San Francisco educators are on the chopping block along with 65 administrators in Oakland and 87 total cuts in Alum Rock.

Just because teachers got the notices doesn’t mean they lost their jobs. Those decisions are still months away.